charles barrow's writing

Inevitably, it happened. There was a flaw in my plan and someone elbowed their way through it, carrying the book I was reading, and walked on out the library door with it. You'll have to read my last post to make complete sense of the sentence above, but that will only take you a couple of minutes, so I'll wait..... Yes, a couple of weeks ago, someone borrowed the copy of Real Life, by Brandon Taylor, that I was reading my way through at the library. When I discovered it was missing from the T section on its usual shelf I hunted high and low, across all the display shelves where I had found it once before, but to no avail. It was gone, someone had borrowed it. I checked the on-line catalogue. Yep. It was confirmed. It was out on a three week loan. Damn. Still, I had a Plan B, in the form of about ten thousand other books I could pick up instead. I had promised myself to read a Zadie Smith in this very situation, but there was only one of hers on the shelf and it wasn't one ...

"Dazzling, seemingly effortless writing." This quote is from a Sunday Telegraph review of Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. I just finished reading it today and it's shot into my top ten best ever books chart, to keep company with Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which I read a few years ago. I'd had Wonder Boys on my bookshelf for a while. It never seemed the right moment to pick it up, but you know how sometimes a book chooses you? It comes along when you're ready for it, need it even. That's what I feel happened with Wonder Boys. I'm not one for writing book reviews. Trying to condense an entire plot into one paragraph seems rather discourteous somehow. But I will tell you that two of the main characters are a middle aged professor, and mid-career novelist, Grady Tripp and his young student and would-be author James Leer. Tripp has writer's block and no idea how to finish his 2,000 page, seven years in the writing novel Wonder...

So the Government continues to slash public spending and public services continue to suffer. Ensuring that those with the least have access to even less.  There is more talk of yet more library closures. Those that survived the first few rounds of cuts by tightening their belts until they could barely breathe will finally have their oxygen machines switched off completely. A defender of this policy missed the point, I thought, on a radio interview when he claimed that libraries are an irrelevance because all the literature that they contain is available on the internet. All apologists for library closures miss the point I reckon when they offer up the internet as an alternative library.  I think there is an obvious distinction to be made here. Literature is available to download from the internet, books aren't. Books as physical objects are available to borrow free from a library. Books as beautiful physical objects to be handled and cherished. As a child I fell in love ...